Strongest Nova: Path of Vengeance

Chapter 285: Toward the Center

Stanley slept through the night near the small fire they had kept going throughout the night. When he woke up in the morning, Red was half asleep herself, staring around her with her eyes barely open.

The old woman was more tired than Red it seemed, so she was still asleep.

"Red, you can sleep now," Stanley said as he stretched wide. "I’ll look out henceforth."

Red slowly nodded and dropped to the side, sleeping on top of a small sheet with a blanket on top of her. It wasn’t long before she fell asleep.

Stanley looked around him at the place he had been sleeping in. It was the middle of nowhere, with barely any protection from the elements. And the sky was getting dark as if it would pour at any moment.

"Nope, that’s not snow," Stanley said to himself with a sigh. It seemed it was going to be raining. That was slightly problematic, but not as much as it would have been without the old woman’s presence there.

Stanley stayed there alone for some time, thinking back to White and Green who had died so simply. They hadn’t even died to any humans, but just the barrier. He felt sick knowing that this thing was being shown to the people outside.

There were people out there somewhere finding pleasure in everyone’s pain.

The old woman woke up half an hour later, complaining about the pain in her shoulders. "It’s going to rain, isn’t it?" she asked as she looked to the sky.

"Seems so," Stanley said. "We will need to find some place to keep ourselves hidden."

"I can maybe make ourselves some fabrics to keep ourselves from being wet. As I’m incapable of making metals, I can’t really make any umbrellas," she said.

"What about some tents?" Stanley asked.

The woman shook her head.

"How are we supposed to survive without tents or raincoats? Do they want to see us die to the cold?" Stanley couldn’t help but ask.

"Who says there aren’t any tents?" the woman asked. "Didn’t they say that they constantly send food and other resources in the grassland?"

Stanley thought for a bit and nodded. "They did," he said. "How far is that place?"

"How are we to tell?" the woman asked, looking around. "The trees are too tall. We can’t see..."

"What?" Stanley asked when the woman paused. She seemed to have realized something. She quickly stood up and looked back toward the large wall.

Stanley looked back and saw the wall too. It was closer than it was yesterday, but only a little bit. It was not close enough that they had to worry about it just yet.

"That wall, can you see how it curved?" she asked.

Stanley nodded.

"Based on its curvature, and how much distance between us and each point of the wall there is, we can tell where the center of this circle is," she said. "Without actual numbers, it will be difficult, but given the general shape..."

The woman started drawing a rough sketch on the ground with a stick and noted the relative distance from the wall to pinpoint their possible positions on the ground, thereby deducing which was it was to the center of the circle.

"That way," she said and pointed.

Stanley looked in the direction and recognized it to be the area where the stack of rocks had exploded last night.

"We’ll proceed in that direction."

It started in just a few hours, and Red couldn’t even get that much sleep before she had to wake up and start walking away.

They looked for places to make their camp, but there were non-so-good places where they were. The location they were at seemed to be a sort of valley with rainwater pooling in the area with nowhere to go.

There were puddles all around them by this point.

Stanley walked with the old woman who had her blanket wrapped around herself and him. With both of them having one of their arm unusable, they had to stick together to make it work.

Red walked on her own, looking for stacks of rock, just in case.

"Do you think you can maybe make a sword of some sort?" Stanley asked the woman. "Even if it’s illogical."

"I can think of ways to make a sword, but the problem isn’t the sword, but what I would lose instead," she said. "For something like a sword, I would have to give up a lot, and I don’t want to lose anything."

"If I could do with some hair or nails, or even some bad memories from my past, I would. But something like a sword would require a lot, and I’m not yet willing to let go of something so big from my life."

Stanley sighed. He really needed a sword.

"I guess I’ll have to get one from the center area then," Stanley said. He looked at the piece of stick jotting out of a small cloth that wrapped around his waist now, like a bet. "This will have to do for now."

"EEYAAA!" Red suddenly screamed and fell flat on her face.

Stanley quickly turned to look at her, but just as he did, he too stumbled suddenly and fell. The old woman, however, managed to keep standing. Although, she could tell that she couldn’t move either.

"My feet are stuck," she grunted, trying to pull her feet out of the mud. "What is this? Quicksand?"

"No," Red shouted. "It’s like some sort of—"

She suddenly stopped talking as they all heard a noise coming from above them. Stanley looked up just in time to see two people jumping down from the tree.

One of them was a man and the other one a woman. The woman jumped down next to Red while the man fell on Stanley.

Stanley could immediately see into the future that the woman was gonna kill Red with a single attack, so he twisted his body until his right arm could move.

And then he shot the stick he had in his waist directly at the woman.

The woman exploded into a mist of blood and bone before she could even make it all the way down.